I'm no longer employed at Noguska, and have taken a leave
from the Nola accounting project. My wife had ouy baby, Carson
Alexander last week. I'm now working for Backwatcher as a
security geek, and doing some independant consulting.

I spent most of today setting up a remote X client
workstation. This is so sweet! Boot off a floppy, NFS
mount /. Runs X and XDM login. Can run a vmware instance
inside of X. Is there nothing better? Why do people need
computers anymore? Other than not being about to play some
windows games (I don't imagine vmware works well with full
screen direct x type games, who knows?) My k6 200 doesn't
seem like crap when it's doing remote X off a k7 1300
server.

I think I'll surprise my wife and make all the computers at
home boot X tomorrow ;-)

I submitted a paper, and should be speaking at Rubi-con in April on
secure web app design. Those rubi-con people are a crazy
bunch.

NOLA is looking good. I finished some payroll PDF stuff
today, and apart from some last minute GL changes that need
made to the payroll check void stuff, we're all done. I'd
like to tag and roll tomorrow.

Beth is feeling better. She had yesterday off, and may
take this Saturday off as well. I'd like to do something
special with her, but my lack of ingenuity for all things
non-computer prohibits me.

Not much new going on. NOLA is still scheduled for a Sept
10th release. The payroll might only be about beta quality
on release, but everything else seems solid. The windows
and unix installation software will be made available then
as well. It's unfortunately configured very statically for
our purposes, but hopefully someone can make it a little
more universal. The windows install is Installshield
based, asks about 4 questions and installs and configures
NOLA, Apache, PHP, and MySQL. The unix install is a shell
script that asks the install path and compiles and
configures everything.

Time Warner finally fixed my circuit. I can't believe such
a large organization has so few people with clue. Not only
was my assigned static IP not being routed, but I had to
console into the provided cisco router to find out what ip
it was even supposed to be. Not a single person there
could give it to me. Among my many helps calls with them
was a "router tech", who told me that my subnet was
255.255.255.252, and my router address ended in .32 (which
has to be a network address with that subnet), a different
customer had .33 (yeah, thru my router?!), my static ip
was .34 (it wasn't, but this was at least possible), and my
broadcast was .35. Really, my router was .37 and my static
was .38. I realyl haven't had many other bad experiences
with them, I just hope they don't get the ameritech
attitude of 'Because we're the phone company, that's
why.'

Beth has been very sick all weekend. I think she is
stressed from her work. She hasn't had a day off in
something like 28 days, working 60 hour weeks.

w00h00! The accounting app, named NOLA, is scheduled for
release under the GPL Sept. 10. We have some last minute
fixes and documentation we need to finish up beforehand.
It is PHP and MySQL based, (with other database support
through the ADODB
project. It can be served from
linux,bsd's,solaris,winnt/2k, and pretty much anything else
that PHP and MySQL will run under. Clients can be anything
with a web browser that support javascript and a pdf
viewer.
Full inventory, payables, receivables, ledger, and payroll.
Initially we'll offer pay support, as well as mailing lists
and a bug tracking system, and possibly offer ASP hosting
of it before too long. Yay!

Just finished a long shell script for installation of a PHP
project, and came to the realization that an automated
installation thing for PHP projects would be a good thing.
If there still isn't anything available in about a month
I'll probably start one. I don't know if autoconf/make is
really suited well to do this, or rpm (prob not since most
apache/php installs aren't from rpm, so I don't think rpm
could easily detect them), or whether something that just
built a shell script would be best. I do know that the
current standard of each project providing their own
(sometimes lacking) INSTALL file isn't as suited for new
users as is running rpm -i or make;make install.

In my quest to convince the Pointy Haired Bosses that open
sourcing our new accounting app is a good thing, I came
across an inportant discovery. I don't need to estimate
the amount of support revenue that the GPL'd product will
bring in. For GPL'ing the software to increase revenue, it
just needs to bring in more support dollars than you will
lose
in licensing fees. Given that we've always went after a
niche market, this is almost a certainty.

If anyone wants it,
here is a great paper by Paul Everitt of Digital
Creations
(Zope) about why they open-sourced their product. It's a
wonderful
paper that makes a very strong business case... I'm
surprised I hadn't come across it before.